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A jam submission

PlantetsView game page

Grow your garden
Submitted by aaaaaaaaa — 16 hours, 55 minutes before the deadline
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Plantets's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
THEME: How well the theme is used?#263.9603.960
​POLISH: What is the overall quality of the game?#433.6403.640
FUN: Is the game enjoyable to play?#503.2403.240

Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Very pretty game with a great atmosphere, albeit slow paced.

Submitted(+1)

This is one of my favorite games of the jam.  Great work.

Submitted(+1)

A very interesting game, although it is really slow-paced plus the shopkeeper is kinda lazy to visit me. But I do like text-detailed descriptions of everything. This game has a lot of opportunities to implement, including even modding!

Submitted(+1)

It's a really cool idea. I hope you continue development, i for sure think it has the potential to become a finished game. 

Developer

Thanks! Think I'll enter the Farm Jam next, where I'll probably incorporate  something similar (though probably not in hex form).

Submitted(+1)

Interesting, very interesting, but I didn't get any honey.

Move tool - I expected I could move the whole rock at different points on the screen, like moving a camera, but that didn't work. It seemed it's only needed to catch the flying pieces of rock.
Rotate tool - is that just for rotating the whole rock, so different parts of the rock get water?
Scissors tool - is that the tool I would need to use 99% of the time?
Digger tool - how do I make a pond? It just threw pieces away from my rock, why would I want to do that?

What do I do with the flowers? I cut them with scissors, so I get more plant?
What does the bees and some other insects do? I could use the gun on either one.
What are brown hexes and is the gray hexes just dead rock? Are these I should dig out?
How do I get honey? What is meat for? Are the plants meat-eating plants?
So many questions, so little answers.

Wouldn't it make more sense that the grass grows on top of the hexes, not behind of the hexes? Later in the game, I lost the flashlight that was illuminating the hexes, not sure how. Would also be useful if the tools can be accessed from numeric keys.

Developer (1 edit)

Hey, thanks for the review. 

The move and rotate tools probably could've been implicit tools, I agree. Yes, the shovel tool is for creating ponds- ponds form in rain when you have at most 4 contiguous empty tiles on a hexagonal ring, where (0, 0) is the hex centre (in axial coordinates) and is the centre of the planet ("plantet"). Ponds hold more water than grass (1000 vs 255) and transport water to surrounding hexes much more efficiently, the idea is that with a large pond you don't have to wait for rain. In hindsight how to dig ponds is really unclear; I don't think anyone has actually managed to successfully form a pond. Having ponds only form on empty tiles in a hexagonal ring was just easier to program, honestly- but it does seem to be too constrained.

I intended to have a fly eating plant that grows on hexes where meat recently decomposed, but I didn't have enough time to add that unfortunately. As a result, meat is just fertilizer. Flowers produce nectar. Some flying pieces of rock carry honeycombs- when a bee occupies a honeycomb, that's when they start transporting+turning nectar into honey (they do a bit more than this- but that's their essential role). Again, apologies that none of this is clear or intuitive- I intended this to be a bit of a puzzle game, but I think the pacing and player-interaction-feedback loop needed some work. The shopkeeper gives hints on some of this when you talk to him, but he only arrives every 5-8 minutes.

With a little more time, I probably would've added a couple more events, man-eating flowers and either tutorial or some way to nudge the player to correct behaviours. I was probably a bit ambitious on what I wanted to achieve for my first gamejam in just 6 days. Numerical hotkeys for tools was something that was always on the back of my mind, but always said to myself "I'll add it later." As you can see I never added it later, lol.

Again, thanks for the constructive review. This is my first gamejam and I learnt a lot.

Submitted(+1)

Add the list of such features to you game page (you can still edit the text during voting) and mark the features that currently not fully implemented. Would be helpful to see the definitive list of possibilities in one place.

Submitted(+1)

The rain and plant growth effects are so cool! Very interesting take on the theme. But the game is a bit slow-paced, I couldn’t tell what do do to make much progress.

Developer

Thanks. The shopkeeper takes like 5-8 minutes on average to arrive. It's designed to arrive after exactly 2 minutes the first time. I intended for it to be a bit of puzzle game where you ask the shopkeeper on the mechanics so things are revealed gradually but the waiting interval kind of screws up the pacing. I really should've added a shop button.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

The concept is really cool. I love the detail of the vines growing towards the light! Would love to see a 3D version of this on the surface of a planet instead of just 2D around the circle

Submitted(+1)

I love the concept but it was a bit slow paced for me, I had no visualisation on when the shop will come again so I couldn't get to the honey part. I imagined a lot of stuff that could have happened tho!

Submitted(+1)

I was a bit confused about what to do, and missed my first opportunity for the shopping. The concept is really cool though!

Submitted(+1)

Really fun and cozy idea. I actually ended up playing it for quite long. Too bad you ran out of time, could use a bit more polish, but the concept is solid, and I wasn't bored. I can also imagine a number of ways to expand.

At first I was a bit confused about the different events and tiles, so it would have been nice if the concepts explained by the shopkeeper would appear simultaneously with the first occurrence of the events, or something like that.

But overall, great job! 

Submitted(+1)

Fun game! I like the space bonsai kind of feel. There were definitely a lot of cool layers to it like adding new land and plant matter currency to get new tools and fertilizer. I had trouble getting a pond started but I would of love to explore the spuds.

Submitted(+2)

I like the concept but the pacing was much too slow for me. I clicked "talk" on the first random encounter, and then realized I should have done shop instead. I got bored by the time the 2nd opportunity came up

Submitted(+1)

It's so cozy! Getting 100 honey seems totally out of reach though. Here's as far as I got, I think this was ~15 minutes of playtime.